Stephen Shore: Finding beauty in dusty, neon-lit suburbs of 1970s America

The photographer travelled across the vast heartlands of the US, revealing the charm in the mundane

Stephen Shore had a swift and glittering introduction to photography. Born in 1947, the New York native was developing his first pictures as a six-year-old and sold his first works to the Museum of Modern Art at 14.

By 1965, the 16-year-old was photographing the stars at Andy Warhol’s hotspot The Factory. At 23, he was the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But despite coming up amid the glamour of New York City, he is best known for his work depicting sleepy, banal life in the American suburbs.

Over the course of the 1970s, Shore travelled across America’s vast heartlands, through the Deep South to the Midwest. With a large-format camera, he captured the fast food chains, parking lots and motels he found along the way. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places, compiled 61 of these images, and broke new ground as to what was considered fine art photography.

At the time, the book was almost unique in its use of colour photography for an artistic purpose; previously it had been seen as the domain of advertising and picture postcards, a gaudy younger sibling of sophisticated monochrome. Combined with the decidedly lowbrow subject of neon-lit hotels and dusty, forgotten street corners, Shore found a new delicate beauty in both format and subject, creating a uniquely American visual vernacular.

Although the large format of the Uncommon Places collection gives a sense of clear-eyed objectivity, his images hum with an ambiguity and tenderness. They refute the immediacy and action of the Cartier-Bresson-inspired street photography which had gone before, and instead sought out a sense of unselfconscious repose. “His work is Nabokovian for me: exposing so much, and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will,” the playwright Tennessee Williams once said of Shore.

Along with his large format camera, Shore also travelled with a 35mm Leica, shooting on kodachrome film. A new book from MACK reveals this archive of his Uncommon Places era, an alternative narrative of his most creatively groundbreaking decade. Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 shows a more nimble reflection of his journeys; free from his television-sized camera, Shore was free to focus on detail. Transparencies captures the phone booths and cowboy boots, the jazzy ties and afternoon lunches: details of a cultural landscape which has since faded away.

‘Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979’ by Stephen Shore is published by MACK; Stephen Shore will be in conversation with Lou Stoppard at Foyles, London, on 21 May